Obligatory Rice Commentary

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Obligatory Rice Commentary

It is a sad day when the Republicans in power are making me pine for the good old days of Newt Gingrich. The Contract With America actually has some good stuff in it: independent auditing, wanting Congress to look more like regular citizens, publicizing committee meetings, rotating committee chairs, zero base-line budgeting, American Dream Savings Accounts, and not a mention of eliminating the death tax in order to raise the birth tax. Sure, there was ugly stuff, like eliminating child care/welfare for minors, exclusionary rule reform that might prevent, making it harder to raise taxes,

Today, all we have is a Republican party that moves towards more and more regressive tax.

It's unclear how the national or local press will interpret today's hearing. In general, I think jurors, in this case the public, are sympathetic to the witness during interrigation, but I don't really know. Largely, I think her job was simply "Don't screw up", which she didn't.

The proper question to ask here, I think, is this: if reports of suspicious activity in the summer of 2001 were "frustratingly vague", then why was their no upper level effort to find more detail? Yes, there were plenty of bureaucratic barriers in place, but it really doesn't look like anyone even tried to make a stir on this issue.

There are several really important memes that I think are going to be overlooked. I'll do the short version talking points first:

The recommendations of the Hart-Rudman commission were completely and utterly ignored by the administration, in favor of long-term foreign policy concerns related to Russia, China, missle defenes, state-sponsored terrorism, and other Cold War relics. (Gorelick)
National Security bureaucrats should know that the FBI and the CIA can't talk. There are other channels the FBI could have used to raise concerns relating to suspicious activity in the summer of 2001. (Kerrey)
We are just fanning the flames by shooting rockets into mosques. (Kerrey)
Bush didn't respond to the Cole, while Clinton did respond to the embassy bombings in an equivalent amount of time. The idea that you would not engage in "Proportional Response", and instead do nothing while spending months developing some long term plans, is ... misguided (Thompson).
The FBI, generally speaking, was/is not equipped to deal properly with terrorism. (Everybody)
The August 6th PDB needs to be released. (Everybody)

I think the best thing that could happen would be the declassification of the August 6th memo. The panel has called for this again and again, and hopefully the press will badger the White House until it caves. Again.

I'll do the long version breakdown of what I thought of the testimony later.

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Last updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 05:27 16 February 2005
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